multimedia experience: language of new media (94-103)

A nice history lesson on the "screen" from its beginnings as a framed painting to its current status as an interactive space. At one point of the reading the author mentioned how some television screens show a tiny box in the corner so you can see another channel (which I think is stupid by the way, how do you watch multiple things at once?) and brought up how the TV might start bringing in some ideas from the computer. In some ways, it already has adopted some of the actions we see on a computer screen. There are menus to help you surf through channels, and these days you can even keep a list of your favorite channels and do all sorts of personalized security settings if you have children in the house. However, adopting the window metaphor that the computer uses seems a little silly to me. Like I said: why do you need to watch more than one thing at once? Actually, it's funny how the computer has changed a lot of screens. The traditional picture frame shows you one printed image, but now they also have digital picture frames that can do slideshows and play music.

Something that I find interesting (and could definitely play a neat role in my senior degree project) is the idea of the "real-time screen becoming interactive". In terms of communication these days, we have all sorts of things to look to like instant messaging, or even video chatting over skype. It's really bridging the world together in ways faster than we've seen before. Something a friend and I did together regularly a couple summers ago actually, was use a program called "Paint Chat" where we could draw together on a screen. These days it's so easy to communicate, chat, play with people that are oceans apart from us. I think it's neat that the world is crazy amounts of connected, and just think of all the things we can do (and have already done) with real-time updating.